597418

research-article2015

CGJ0010.1177/1474474015597418cultural geographiesDekeyser and Garrett

cultural geographies in practice

Last Breath: unofficial

pre-demolition celebrations

cultural geographies
18
The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1474474015597418
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Thomas Dekeyser

Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Bradley L Garrett

University of Southampton, UK; University of Oxford, UK

Abstract
Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which is soon
to be destroyed. Artistic offerings are recorded in photographs and on video, records released
once the building, along with the art, has been demolished. These place-making events perform
a kind of audio/visual memento mori, reminding us not only of the perpetual transitoriness of
urban existence but also of the potential for participation in such processes. In this article, words,
still images and videographic footage are blended to explore and imagine what sorts of affective
capacities the project might afford through its creative interventions and mediations.
Keywords
architecture, art, demolition, exploration, graffiti, photography, TAZ, urban, video, visual
Out for a walk, after a week in bed,
I find them tearing up part of my block
And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen
In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane
Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years.
James Merrill (An Urban Convalescence)1

Over the past few years, the Last Breath project travelled across the familiar soggy lanes of London,
along the dusty roads of Phnom Penh and onto the windy streets of Melbourne in search of architecture soon to disappear. Condemned spaces were identified by the visual cues of scaffolding, security
fences and heavy machinery poised to pounce. These spaces were then opened up to artists through
an invitation to contribute a piece of work. This was done on the understanding that their work would
not last longer than 48hours. The buildings, once full of striking (con)temporary art, were made
Corresponding author:
Bradley L Garrett, University of Southampton, Geography and Environment, Southampton, SO17 7BJ, UK.
Email: digicado@gmail.com

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cultural geographies

Figure 1. Entrance to exhibition space. Blithehale Medical Centre, London, UK. Photograph by Bradley
L Garrett.

quasi-public, with Last Breath organizers offering tours (Figure 1). The tours took place, at times,
right up into the process of demolition. All of this was done without permission from anyone.
Through artistically inspired place-making events just prior to demolition, Last Breath aims to
perform audio/visual memento mori. This active, material interaction with spaces about to be obliterated, and the creation of art that will inevitably be destroyed, is meant to be a productive method
of engagement with architectural change. The series works to remind us of the perpetual transitoriness of the urban fabric, characterized by continuous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Last Breath, in short, underscores urbanity as a fluid proposition. Last Breath is also,
however, a celebration of participation in that process and of our ability to affect others by becoming actors within our cities, even where, or indeed especially where, we are not invited to. The
intervention, even if largely unnoticed, conjures, in the words of Kathleen Stewart, a speculative
topography of the everyday sensibilities now consequential to living through things.2
The words and imagery presented in this Cultural Geographies in Practice are an attempt to
explore and imagine what sorts of affective capacities the project might afford, beyond disciplinary
borders, through our considerations of architectural geographies as not-only-static, not-only-passive and of course not-only-human. However, we are reluctant to pitch this as a more-than-human
project over-involved in thinginess, for we feel that it is in the melding of matter, human and nonhuman, art and architecture, rubbish and rubble, that the eventfulness of matter finds form in the
folds of experience. What happens in the folds is what is important.3 It is our hope that a phenomenological-weighted focus will trigger thinking about architectural demolition in more than a material and economic sense, bringing creative experimental sensibilities of demolition to the fore. We
also seek to extend our multi-sensual engagement into the dissemination of research materials and
to encourage critical viewing and listening and reading of this work in equal measure.4 The
three videos in this article can be viewed by clicking the links provided. Viewing these videos is
fundamental to the structure of this project.

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Dekeyser and Garrett

These media depict the experience of three interventions as part of the Last Breath project in
culturally distinct geographies of condemned space in the United Kingdom, Cambodia and
Australia. The narrative voice of these interventions is constituted collaboratively by the two
authors who relate to the project in different ways. The first author (T.D.) is a film-maker and artpractitioner involved with conceptualizing the Last Breath project. The second author (B.G.)
encountered one of the episodes of the project as a visitor at the pre-demolition exhibition taking
place in Blithehale Medical Centre in London and followed the project closely after that event.
There is of course a third author here, taciturn but ever-present: the artists who participated in each
intervention. Through blending our internal and external first-person perspectives, it is our intention to open multiple paths through these creative engagements with urban places.

London, UK: Last Breath and architectural dissolution

Blithehale Medical Centre in Bethnal Green was once one of East Londons most prominent medical
centres. By the time we found it on the registry, slated for demolition, there were trees sprouting from
gaps in the tar roof. It had become a contemporary ruin of seemingly little consequence to surrounding
residents; it was simply another East London building awaiting squatters or wrecking balls. Security in
the building was challenging to circumvent. However, within a day an excavator had chewed the top
off of the building, rendering the locked doors at street level redundant. Rolling a rubbish bin next to a
retaining wall, we climbed up and began to create. Installation artist Christiaan Nagel scaled the crumbling walls to install polyurethane mushrooms: colourful reminders of the natural forces always at play
in processes of ruination. Urban art-practitioners RUN and Phlegm also painted mystical, cartoon-like
figures. These figures appeared to be in a state of mourning, perhaps due to the inevitability of their
destruction (Figure 2). The next morning, 12 people jumped the fence to see the exhibition. The day
after, the building and the art now housed within were reduced to rubble.

Figure 2. Fleeing by RUN. Blithehale Medical Centre, London, UK. Photograph by Bradley L Garrett.
Accompanying video: https://vimeo.com/86684655

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cultural geographies

Last Breath explores how the architectural, as a composition of hybrid connections between
human and non-human matter and processes, is an ever-unique assemblage. Human-induced deterritorialization and reterritorialization of place here become a catalyst for interaction and participation in a way that exceeds the expectations of urban planners, architects and property owners. This
kind of affective excess contributes to the recognition of the city as more than a site to be seen.
Architectural affectation is, however, always transmitted through ambiences across a range of
intensities in various urban locales from the sensual potentials of a tranquil living room to the
cold floor of a damp cellar. Cities are places we pass through and reside in, where we attempt to
hold on to things and are forced to let others go. Through creative dialogue with the in-betweenlife-and-death spaces encountered in Last Breath, the architectural potency to induce emotional
responses is intensified in the formation of meld moments between body, art, architecture and the
connective tissue of the city; static boundaries are transformed into porous membranes. And yet, to
call the engagement emotional seems somehow flippant. Each artist, poignantly aware of the
provisional nature of the environment, registers viscerally the significance of her or his own presence and the urgency of the creative intervention. Their tense material interactions function like an
intensive form of habitational dwelling, allowing a sense of spatial connection to arise rapidly. This
charged atmosphere is relayed to other artists, the organizers and visitors in ways that can hardly
be described as simply emotional. The social conditioning and everyday anxieties we carry in our
bodies crack in those moments. We cant help but come closer, cross and share in the particular
intensities of the present tense. We cant help but get into place; we cant help but let place into us.
These residues may linger long after the building is gone.
The affective potential of the actual destructive event is intimately interconnected with the properties of that event. Public demolitions, primed by pre-placed explosives, often present the act of
destruction as entertainment to outsiders. These public demolitions can also be alienating and even
terrifying to those who have a relationship to these places. The particular affective affordances of
such de-constructions are equally tied up in the composition of a range of often-conflicting memories and emotions an individual witness attaches to the specific architectural site.5 Indeed, the
demolition-announcement of a medical centre, as a location of remedy and pain, may unleash a
seemingly incoherent set of emotional responses.
The abandonment and slow decay of particular buildings, devoid of public spectacle, may ping
a sense of local nostalgia (nostalgia being both a positive and negative force, often simultaneously). This can, at times, become debilitating to our ability to embrace process where materialist
ontologies rouse notions of stasis.6 Last Breath betwixts the spectrum in offering a spectacle space
for an underplayed urban note. However, in suggesting the creation of a spectacle (or anti-spectacle
as the case may be) we do not wish to fall into a representational trap, for as we have already
shown, potentials to exceeded expectation are always part of the vibrancy of place.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia: producing architectural memento mori

One of exactly 100 identical residences designed five decades ago to house National Bank of
Cambodia employees, this building was left to rot after the Khmer Rouge enforced anti-urban politics, triggering countless land evictions. Having been abandoned for four decades, the neighbour
warned us as we entered that the ghosts of previous inhabitants continue to occupy the space. Once
inside, unexpected narratives revealed themselves through Marxist prose scribbled on one wall La
Rvolution dabord et toujours (The Revolution first and always) and through a miniature Buddhist
shrine leaning akwardly against another wall. The modern, faceless skyscrapers painted and sculpted
by Cambodian contemporary artist Kong Vollak, as increasingly found in the centre of the capital,
emerged in stark contrast with the cobweb-covered interior surfaces of the building. Layers of

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Dekeyser and Garrett

Figure 3. Untitled by Chifumi. 100 Houses Project, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photograph by Thomas
Dekeyser.
Accompanying video: https://vimeo.com/96795827

meaning accreted further as the artists Chifumi and Al commenced their performance and the cameras start rolling (Figure 3). The next day, the building was packed with people one last burst of
life before the bulldozers closed in.
One might wonder in the context of this experience: if we are so concerned with process, of the
unfolding of the eventful encounter, why then choose to document this process in the way we did?
If we are emphasizing the importance of the artists embracing the transitoriness of their creations in
Last Breath, are we not undermining our own message by creating media which will, in fact, have a
lasting legacy that will outstrip (in terms of breadth of exposure) what bodies-in-place experience?
We might suggest in response that images, like words, are bound to fail and we might as well do all
we can to relay some sense of viscerality through that failure. If we are successful, it may trigger
other events, other encounters, other associations above and beyond our expectancies.
We are, in creating this (multi)media presentation, attempting to open out ways of thinking
iteratively through the affective, the atmospheric, the material and the relational. Rather than conceptualizing potential confrontations between images, sound, text and lived experience, we want to
suggest here the tensious interplay of forms may assists us, since as Latham and McCormack write,
images have the capacity to . . . produc[e] a certain affective resonance between somatic, visual,
sonic and semantic rhythms, without necessarily reducing these to the terms of an interpretive narrative.7 It would be nave, indeed dishonest, to think that the senses are being captured by glass
and furry microphones and accurately transmitted. What we want to relay here instead is a sense of
possibility shot through with immediacy. This intervention then, from the initial searches in the
land registry for spatial canvases to you reading/watching/hearing this article, works to question,
re-function, and contest prevailing norms and ideologies, and to create new meanings, experiences,
relationships, understandings and situations.8

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Melbourne, Australia: performing and negotiating space

Isolated by three directly surrounding lanes and accessible via only secure gates, this 500m2 warehouse appeared more a medieval castle than a storage area. The access point to the building was
not at all clear. What was clear, however, was that we were not the first to have spotted the sole
open window: a tiny gateway into this monstrous urban cavern. Climbing through, it was clear that
squatters had previously appropriated the peeling walls as home. Graffiti crews had made their
mark on those same walls. Visually, the space was storied. It was the acute scent of a dissolving
pigeon, however, that most dominated the place. Scattered around this creature an eclectic set of
discarded commodities were decomposing more slowly: a rusty typewriter, a dismantled childrens
bed and a plastic Christmas tree that refused to shed its needles despite its suggestive deciduousness. The artists, used to legally decorating specific outdoor surfaces at Melbournes approved
locations, enjoyed the non-restricted potential of exploring with artistic forms and sizes in this
immense, ungoverned warehouse. As the first glossy sprays of paint touched the walls, the site,
drenched in decay, lurched into the present forcefully. Another layer was being shaped right here
in front of us (Figure 4).
The potential of site-specific art practices, and of accompanying videographic productions that
prolong the performances in space and time, should be attended to in terms of their distinctive
productive power.9 The artists involved in Last Breath, through their spatial interventions, mould
spaces through additions rather than replacements. There is a meld rather than an erasure. This
architectural space, its matter, rhythms and forces constitute as strongly in the work as the artists
themselves, conjointly generating a route to imagine and forge other possible urban worlds.10 The
performative potency is therefore also not as much rooted in their individual art practices as in the

Figure 4. About to blow by Putos. Lothian Street 97, Melbourne, Australia. Photograph by Thomas
Dekeyser.
Accompanying video: https://vimeo.com/100423570

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Dekeyser and Garrett

affective encounter they co-produce. As we travel the world collecting these small stories, we can
imagine engendering the works collectively across the planet and feel the distinct rush that comes
with knowing we are producing alternative space.11
It has been suggested that subsequent representations of this primary embodied encounter are
overwhelmed by notions of reduced potentiality.12 However, following Harriet Hawkins, we would
like to highlight the creative potential of our outputs not as representations but as refrains to the
events themselves. Whether we are thinking about experimental, creative or artful geographies,
audio/visual work is explicit in re-envisioning the geographer not merely as a (critical) bystander
but as an active and creative producer of space.13 To that end, we want to raise awareness of the
need to be attentive to how our filmic productions go to work in the world. Here, we align videomaking alongside geographical writings on the world-making capacities of creative productions,
taking forward their replacement of creativity as a form of singular, human, authorial poesis, with
a more distributed sense of creativity.14 The short-lived experience we built finds new time, space
and audiences through its audio/visual extensions. Each secondary encounter with the extended
space offers a direct invitation to experience, through an immediate, bodily presence one of Last
Breaths next site-specific iterations.
Acknowledgements
Thomas Dekeyser wishes to thank all the artists involved in the creative practices that unfolded during the
different iterations of the Last Breath project. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewer for her or his
insightful comments.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. J.Merrill, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 127-29.
2. K.Stewart, Atmospheric Attunements, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 29(3), 2011,
p. 445.
3. D.Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 249.
4. B.Garrett, Videographic Geographies: Using Digital Video for Geographic Research, Progress in
Human Geography, 35(4), 2010, pp. 52141.
5. S.High and D.W.Lewis, Corporate Wasteland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
6. See B.Garrett, Assaying History: Creating Temporal Junctions Through Urban Exploration,
Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 29(6), 2011, pp. 104867.
7. A.Latham and D.P.McCormack, Thinking with Images in Non-Representational Cities: Vignettes from
Berlin, Area, 41(3), 2009, p. 260.
8. D.Pinder, Urban Interventions: Art, Politics and Pedagogy, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 32(3), 2008, p. 730.
9. H.Hawkins, Turn Your Trash into . . . Rubbish, Art and Politics: Richard Wentworths Geographical
Imagination, Social & Cultural Geography, 11(8), 2013, pp. 80527; H.Hawkins, For Creative
Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds (London: Routledge, 2013).
10. Hawkins, For Creative Geographies, p. 135.
11. T.Paglen, Experimental geography: from cultural production to the production of space, in Thompson,
N. (ed.) Experimental geography (New York: Melville House, 2008), pp. 27-33.
12. P.Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 2003); M.Yerushamly,
Performing the Relational Archive, Photography and Culture, 2(2), 2009, pp. 15370.

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13. M.Gallagher and J.Prior, Sonic Geographies: Exploring Phonographic Methods, Progress in Human
Geography, 38(2), 2013, pp. 26784.
14. Hawkins, For Creative Geographies; A.Kanngieser, Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013).

Author biographies
Thomas Dekeyser is an MA Cultural Geography (Research) student at Royal Holloway, University of
London, and an art-practitioner on the Last Breath project.
Bradley L Garrett is a Social and Cultural Geographer at the University of Southampton and the author of
Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City.

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